Buffalo Palace

18

“Whereaway you bound, my son?”

In his dreamlike reverie Titus peered up at the old man leading a fine horse up to his evening fire. Nighttime had come early that autumn so long, long ago now … and with it the cold as he rode closer to the city of his dreams.

Lulled now into daydreaming once more by the late-summer heat on his back and the rocking-chair gait of the saddle horse beneath him, Scratch’s wandering mind remembered that fine fall evening.

“St. Louie,” he had answered the stranger.

Bass had been a sull young’un back then, with no more than nineteen summers under his belt.

“Ah,” the old fellow replied as he halted, his expressionless face staring down in study at the small, cheery fire a moment, then finally regarded the youth and the rifle across the youngster’s lap. “I am but a poor wayfarer. Do you mind if I share your fire and a bit of conversation this night?”

Bass tossed another limb onto the flames and shrugged. “I was just getting used to the lonesome.”

At the sudden beating of several pairs of wings, his eyes fluttered open—blinking—to find himself on horseback … realizing he had been dreaming, remembering. How that younger man had, perhaps for the first time in his life, been truly getting used to the lonesome.

When at the age of sixteen Titus took off from home, he hadn’t gone that many days before he yearned for the sound of another’s voice, just the look and smell and nearness of other humans. So what with the riverboatmen and the Ohio River whore called Mincemeat, along with the others who saw him across the wide Mississippi to Able Guthrie’s farm, and then with Guthrie’s most desirable daughter herself … why, he hadn’t ever been truly alone ever since the day he’d run off—just himself and the forest.

Back then he realized this aloneness would take some getting used to. Some men took to it natural. Others never would—so it was best their kind stayed back east of the river. The third sort were like himself, Bass figured: they could do with bouts of aloneness as long as there were times when a man set his sights on being with folk. Those occasions between the long stretches of aloneness before the loneliness began to creep in—the bawdy summer celebrations of rendezvous or settling into a friendly village for the winter—he had come to believe would be enough to hold the lonelies at bay.

What he would give now for to share food and fire with a friend—even a stranger as strange as Garrity Tremble.

With that steady rock of the horse as they plodded east along the Little Bear River, he let his eyes slowly droop and drifted back to remembering….

Recalling how the old man turned toward a tow sack he had tied behind his well-worn saddle, explaining, “I have food to offer, young man. You decide to share your fire and your talk, I’ll share supper.”

Wayfarers they both had been that night. Perhaps ever after and still, they both remained wayfarers. That is, if the old man had not died in all those cycles of the seasons, those roundabout circles of his life in the intervening years. Perhaps Garrity Tremble did still ride the circuit, his only home the old saddle strapped on the back of the blooded thoroughbred. A homeless wanderer—very much as Scratch himself had come to be out here in this great wilderness. Now he rode the circle of the seasons—alone for the most part … yet always yearning to circle back toward those shining times when he would again look upon the faces of friends, when his ears would resonate with the sound of their familiar voices and laughter.

On that cold autumn night along the Mississippi a dozen years before, Titus had asked of the old man, “Where are you off to?”

Raising an arm that looked more like a winter-bare branch poking out of the sleeve of that huge, ill-fitting coat he wore, the stranger pointed off here, there, then off in another direction altogether. “No place special. Off to where the spirit moves me. God tells me where I am to go—as He told the wandering Israelites of Moses and Joshua of olde. Yet, truth be it, I—like you—am ultimately alone. Alas, that is God’s condition yoked upon the shoulders of us all, isn’t it, son? As many as we might have around us, family and acquaintances, we are still alone in this life, and God makes the only sure friend we will ever truly have.”

With a snort of doubt Titus had said, “I’ve had me lots of friends.”

From beneath the bushy eyebrows that stood out like a pair of hairy caterpillars on the pronounced and bony brow, the stranger sneered, “Yes—I can see by all these companions you have brought along with you on this journey.”

“They are here!” he snapped at the sudden, harsh judgment, and tapped a finger against his chest. Then added, more quietly, “Right in here.”

For a long moment the stranger regarded that, weightily, then smiled warmly as he tossed Bass three ears of the corn the preacher was donating to that night’s repast. “Yes. I believe you might just be the sort who would hold a friend dear in your heart.”

He always had been that sort. This matter of friends and the heart ran narrow and deep, rather than wide and shallow.

Whether it was the riverboatmen or Hysham Troost back in St. Louie, that dream reaper named Isaac Washburn, or those three who had shown up that first autumn in the Rockies to save Titus … friends had been just about the dearest, most precious, love he had experienced in his heart. And the remembrance of those friends was ofttimes his only protection against the lonelies. Everything else Titus could do for himself: he could hunt and trap and survive on his own. But he knew he could not last without friends, not without that sacred place his friends shared within his heart.

At those times of the most excruciating loneliness, Scratch had survived because of those warm memories.

“God has taken care of me for more years than you have been breathing, young man,” Tremble had explained that cold night after they had supped. “And I trust in Him for when there are not folks to take me in and spread their board before me. At such times God will provide me the opportunity to feed myself. It was a fine feast, wasn’t it, young man?”

“A good change from pig meat.”

With a visible shudder the old man wagged his head. “How I have come to hate Ned.”

“Ned? Why you hate him? Who’s he, anyhow?”

“Not who—what. Ned is pork. Ned is pig meat. Ned is the sustenance of the devil himself! No, I haven’t partaken of Ned in so long, I cannot remember.” He pointed a bony finger at Titus. “And you would do well to swear off it as well. Cloven-hoofed, unclean, filthy beasts that they are.”

“But if a man’s hungry—”

“He’s better off going hungry than biting into any Ned! God will provide for his redeemed souls … without any of us having to descend into the fiery depths and dine on the devil’s fodder.” He raised his face and arms to the sky, closed his eyes, to say, “Praise God I no longer eat such a beast.”

The sudden quiet startled him, causing a crack to split his twelve-year-old reverie. As he opened his eyes and blinked in the bright summer sun, Bass tightened his grip on the wrist of the riflestock. And listened.

All quiet—except for the clatter of the many hooves coming up behind him. Glancing at the sky, he found no birds on the wing. Occasionally a breeze tussled the cottonwood leaves overhead before it fell breathlessly quiet again. Not much more than the buzz of flies that seemed to constantly hover over the sweating animals, sometimes diving beneath the brim of Scratch’s hat to torment his face.

He yanked back on the reins before he realized what he had done—before it became a thought he could remember going over in his mind. Slipping quickly from the sweat-soaked saddle as the other horses and mules came up, Bass hurried toward the prints he had spotted, and knelt over them.

Unshod pony hooves. By themselves not something of concern. This was Ute country, after all. But mingled in among the hoofprints were moccasin tracks—and those sure weren’t Ute moccasins.

Unconsciously, he rubbed his shoulder long ago healed from the Arapaho’s war club, then realized that he was—so took that hand and laid its fingers in the moccasin tracks … as if to confirm that his eyes were not playing tricks on him.

They were real.

Without rising Scratch looked up, around at the brush. Then got to his feet and followed the tracks to the edge of the river, watched them enter the water and disappear. Two ponies and one set of moccasin prints. Maybe because one of them had to make water right then and there. Sure enough, Titus found where the warrior had stepped over to the brush and stood there. Not that the soil at the base of the brush was still damp—but he could imagine the man pulling aside his breechclout, standing patiently to finish his business, then remounting to cross the river with his companion.

“They’re across now,” he confided to himself. And tried to convince his thumping heart that the danger had passed with that crossing.

He’d push on, Scratch decided—not letting himself get lulled tack into napping. Stay awake and watch for sign. If those two recrossed the river, they were sure to pick up sign of all these animals. Then the fat would sure as hell drop in the fire. But for now he felt safe enough to keep moving east, on toward the foothills where he planned to turn north and make a lodestone run for one of the brigades he knew would be tramping through that country right about now.

“Tell me, my astute young observer of life and the manner of mankind—have you ever thought of taking up the staff of God and preaching His word?” the old man said there beside that long-ago fire.

“Me? A preacher like you?”

“It is not easy work, let me assure you. But it is very, very satisfying.”

“No, sir,” Bass had replied. “I never thought on it at all. I got me my hope to make it to St. Louie. See where things sit up there. Everything on beyond is wild and open.”

“Every man must find his own call. You’ve heard your own call, then. We’ll let it rest at that,” the stranger replied, apparently satisfied with Bass’s answer. “Yes. The beasts and the savages of the wild. Perhaps it is you are called to see them for yourself.”

“Maybeso I’ll get to do that one day.”

“By the grace of God, you will, my son,” the preacher replied. “I trust in God. On I ride to my next flock, gathering ray strength all the while, renewing my vigor in the Lord—for God will provide. Never should you doubt it, young man. The Almighty will provide.”

Titus remembered gazing at the fire, the empty corn husks and naked chicken bones heaped beside the coals, thinking how a man was called upon to help himself. No one else was there to do it for him if a man did not do for himself.

“And He will provide for you, my son,” the old preacher had repeated the next morning after they had arisen, saddled, and were preparing to separate.

“I don’t know that I ever asked nothing of the Lord,” Bass had told Tremble. “Never been much of a one to pray.”

With that hard-boned and angular face of his, the preacher replied, “You yourself told me last night that for a long time you’ve been praying to get to St. Louie.”

“Maybe you misunderstood me. I ain’t never prayed to get to St. Louie—”

“But you’ve hoped, and dreamed, and done all that you could to get there.”

“And I am getting there on my own.”

A smile wrinkled the lined face. “You’re getting there because God is answering your prayer.”

Of a sudden Titus had felt most uneasy, thrown there upon strange ground. Frightened again that he might just be in the presence of something far, far bigger than himself. “I don’t know nothing about that, sir.”

Removing his old felt hat from his head and dipping in a little bow, Tremble said, “I certainly hope that what you pray for, Titus Bass—will not become a yoke locked about your shoulders.”

Minutes later, not all that far downstream, Bass came across the tracks of a single horseman. The prints turned in front of him; then those pony’s hoofprints left the bank and entered the water. Now there were three, he confided to himself, brushing the grip on the flintlock pistol he had stuffed into the sash at his waist. Reassurance. The sort he got when he squeezed down, locking his grip around the rifle laid across the tops of his thighs. And turned to glance behind him. Hannah. All the rest behind her.

Three of them on the other side of the river now. He realized he’d have to keep his eyes moving back and forth along that south bank. It wouldn’t do to have himself surprised.

In bewildered silence twelve years back Titus had watched Tremble turn the big animal away and move off into the cold, frosty, autumn stillness of the forest. Before he climbed atop Able Guthrie’s old plow horse, Titus cautiously placed a hand upon one shoulder, as if to feel for any invisible weight there. Then touched the other shoulder in the same way. Still not satisfied, he shook his shoulders as if to rock loose anything perchance resting there. Then Bass decided it was all a little ghosty and superstitious of him to believe any preacher knew what he was talking about.

To think of it! Him, praying! Why, Titus knew he’d never prayed a prayer one in his entire life—leastways ever since he stopped going to church hand in hand with his mam.

A man had to provide for himself.

Just as he always had, Titus had figured.

Anything else was nothing more than superstition.

But—by damned—the hair went up on the back of his shaggy neck when after less than another mile he came upon the sign of a fourth horseman coming in from the east, turning down the bank to cross the river just as the others had. And the only way possible he thought to quell his growing fear was to talk out loud. Hardly a whisper, but still so he could be heard. Whatever it was that others believed in, that which was greater than himself—Bass spoke to it now.

“Just show me the way outta this,” he whispered, his hand sweating on the reins and the lead rope strung back to Hannah.

“You know damn well I ain’t ever been one for going down on my prayer bones and taffying up to you … but you show me the way outta this here fix right now … I swear I’ll be one to look for your sign and heed, no matter what.”

With the back of a leather sleeve, he swiped across his sweaty face. Then added, “I vow I’ll pay heed and listen too.”

Hannah snorted.

Twisting around in the saddle, he watched her bob her head, jerking back on the lead rope.

He listened too.

She snorted again, her ears perked, pointing stiffly at the sky. And her glistening nostrils flared as wide as the eye sockets on a buffalo skull.

Damn, if that weren’t sign enough. The mule had winded Injuns.

What with them horses coming up behind her, Bass didn’t have time to stop and take account of much. Instead he tugged on Hannah’s lead rope and nudged the saddle horse in the ribs with his heels, reining it off into the trees that lined the narrow river. There at the edge of the cottonwood and brushy willow, Titus kept the horse at a slow walk, his eyes moving constantly, his ears eager for any suspicious sound. Yard by yard, they covered what must have been a mile, then a second mile. How much farther would they have to cover ground at this snail’s pace? he wondered.

Better to be slow, careful, and quiet? Or to jump and get the hell on out of the country—to make a race of it then and there?

He was squeezing down hard on his memory right then, trying to dredge up what it was Isaac Washburn had told him he had done coming east with Hugh Glass and two others along the Platte when they found themselves butting squarely up against an Arikara war party come down to do some raiding in the middle of Pawnee country. But all he could remember of the tale was that the two others went under—leaving Hugh and Isaac to hide for their lives in a riverbank hole.

From there they traveled by night, hid by day.

It caused him to glance up at the sun then and there. Way up high did it hang that hot summer day. A long time till sunset, longer still until it would be slap dark. If he could keep from making a sight of himself, keep all these animals from stirring up too much noise at all … then maybeso that old preacher’s God was one to listen to a man’s vow—

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he bawled as the saddle horse carried him slowly around a left-hand bend in the river.

Four of them … bold as brass—spread out across some twenty yards of a small, open patch of grassy ground not cluttered with trees and brush. He yanked ack on the horse’s rein and jerked to a halt, Hannah coming up on their tail roots.

Four horsemen all right—naked to the waist. Their brown skin glistening with sweat beneath the hot sun. Black hair tossing in the rare breeze, a feather or two stirring among them. And they were close enough for Bass to make out the dull smear of earth paint across cheeks and brows, noses and chins.

It didn’t savvy to get no closer, or to try hand-talk with those red niggers—not the way they was decked out to fill their dance card at the widow-maker’s ball!

Not taking his eyes off the four sitting still as statues just staring at him a moment, Bass yanked on Hannah’s rope, bringing the mule alongside him. There he pulled loose the knot securing the lead rope to the next horse and flung it far aside.

Then he hurled Hannah’s rope off onto her packs, slapping her on her neck and saying, “You’re on your own, girl! Best you cover ground … now—git!”

Screeching like a scalded house cat, Bass screwed that saddle horse around in a circle about as tight as if it had been dancing two-legged atop one of Ebenezer Zane’s hogshead barrels of Kentucky tobacco leaf bound south for New Orleans. As he was jabbing heels against the horse’s ribs and slapping the loose end of the rein back and forth across its front flanks, Bass heard the yelps of those four behind him.

Goddamned Arapaho for sure!

Couldn’t be no others, he knew. This was Ute country—certain as sun. Only raiders wore paint. And the chances were better than good that where he saw four Arapaho … there would be more.

Glancing over his shoulder, as the horse bolted off for the open ground some distance from the river, Bass caught a glimpse of the four horsemen reaching the horses and mules. Damn, if his trick was working!

But in that instant flicker of a look through the sweat in his eyes, Bass could count only three of the four warriors slowing up, mixing in among the pack string he had just released and spooked into motion to cover his retreat.

Just where in hell that fourth horseman had gone, he could not tell in that heartbeat he gave himself before turning back and kicking hell out of the horse some more.

Hoofbeats right on nis tail now—so close, it made his skin crawl, knowing that sound signaled the approach of the fourth horseman. Instead of finding a painted warrior when he turned to look over his shoulder, Bass caught a glimpse of the mule, straining with all the bottom she had to keep up with him and the saddle horse on the flat-out.

“C’mon, you girl you!” he bellowed as loud as he could, feeling nis words ripped away from his lips the second they were spoken. “Get up here, Hannah! Get up! Hep, hep, girl!”

Again and again he called out, assuring her—reassuring himself that she could keep up with him despite her packs as he put more and more ground behind him, racing back downstream.

For the longest time, in and out of the brush and trees, up and down one rise after another, across shallow draws and sandy islands when he decided to ford the river itself, Bass glanced over his shoulder—finding the solitary horseman still coming. How the wind pulled at his shiny black hair feathered out behind him the way a raven’s wing would glimmer in sunlit flight. His pony’s bound-up tail bobbing instead of flying loose on the run. Just a glimpse … but it looked to be the warrior carried a bow and a handful of arrows in his right hand, that arm held out for balance most of the time, except when he swept it back and struck the pony on the rear flank—urging more and more speed from the straining animal.

From side to side Hannah bravely lunged after Titus, laboring under her two packs that bobbed and weaved, pulling her in one direction, then the other. Already he could see the first foamy flecks of lather gathering at her chest harness. Ribs heaving, nostrils slickened, muzzle gulping air as she hung as close as her remaining strength allowed.

But when he looked back at Hannah the next time, the horseman had disappeared.

Bass blinked sweat from his eyes, then clumsily dragged his sleeve across his face with the arm that clutched the rifle, bobbing up and down like a Boone County child’s dancing toy. Maybeso it was a trick. He glanced at the nearby hillside, just to be sure the warrior hadn’t taken another route. Then Bass twisted to the other side—and still did not find the horseman.

But it was plain Hannah had started to fade.

As much as she tried, strained, lunged into the race, she was falling farther and farther behind him. And that made Scratch afraid the fourth horseman would then be able to capture her as her strength faded. As much as she would try to stay far from the Arapaho—it would likely be a futile effort once all her bottom was gone and she could run no more.

Then she would be snared just like those other horses and mules….

And that caused him his first doubt for what he had done in releasing the pack string.

Dry-mouthed, Bass no more hammered the horse with his heels. No more did he whip the rein back and forth, from side to side and flank to flank. He glanced back. Hannah was dropping behind all the farther.

He was drenched with sweat as he let the weary horse slow of its own, twisting in the saddle to watch the backtrail where he had been riding along the south side of the river, his eyes moving everywhere at once. He licked his dry lips and gulped. Thirsty as he’d ever been—or perhaps it was just the fear.

The horse fought him a minute as it slowed all the more, tired of the race and thirsty too. Then Titus brought it around and slowly halted. Hannah came up within moments and stopped, heaving, lather at her halter, foam darkening the leather straps of her pack harness.

Had they made it out?

Just he, the mule, and this saddle horse?

Maybeso it was a good ruse, you savvy son of a bitch, he congratulated himself—still watching the far side of the river from the shadows where he sat on the played-out horse. Hannah snorted in her fatigue.

But every bit as soon as he was patting himself on the back, he heard the echoes of those doubts. Very little time did he give himself for celebration.

There was a good chance he had been wrong in freeing the pack string, part of him said. After all, he had done it almost on instinct. And now—able to think more about it, maybeso even to second-guess himself and the consequences of just what he had done—that act of self-preservation might not have been the wisest of choices.

But what other choices had there been? the other side of him demanded.

Run or fight. Damn well black-and-white, cut-and-dried. Four-to-one odds, at the outside. Hell, there might have been even more of the red niggers off somewhere. Chances good of that, he told himself—justifying his wheeling about and skedaddling all by his lonesome.

An Arapaho war party of ary four warriors come to Ute country? Just four of ’em?

About as likely as one of Annie Christmas’s whores showing up in a Natchez church to preach for Sunday meeting!

Nawww, he’d made the right decision….

So why did it feel so wrong down in the gut of him?

Always have figgered y’ to be the only one ’sides me I could trust with all them critters and the truck the rest of us cain’t take with us on downriver.

That familiar, booming voice rang inside his head as surely as if Silas Cooper were right there, speaking inches from his ears.

Someone had trusted him with near everything they owned—save for their weapons they took with them on that float down to a trader’s post. Near everything Silas, Billy, and Bud could tally up as their own in this life … and Scratch had gone and abandoned it back there: horses, truck, plunder—all of it.

What with the three of them gone off with them packs of beaver to trade high on the upper river before rendezvous, this sure as hell wasn’t feeling the way a man ought to treat the fellas who had saved his life more than once.

I trust y’, Titus Bass. These here other two niggers know I’d damn well trust y’ with ever’thing I own, Scratch … even trust y’ with my own life.

Goddammit.

Slamming his heels back into the reluctant horse’s ribs, Bass reined around toward the river, loping past Hannah, who looked up at him almost humanly—her eyes clearly registering a very big question. If not asking what he was doing and where the hell he was going … then he was certain the mule was asking him just what kind of damned fool he thought he was.

“Stay or come,” he muttered under his breath after she was left behind and he was urging the saddle mount back into the river crossing. “I figger you’ll do only what you wanna do anyway—you cross-headed, stubborn she-critter.”

He figured there was no good decision in this, no clear path to take. And that, Scratch knew, always made for a mess of things in the end, he brooded as he came up the far bank and slowed the horse to a walk—moving carefully, quietly as possible, back into what was plainly enemy country.

If he was lucky, he might just stay out of the way of that solitary warrior long enough for the horseman to give up and turn back to rejoin the other three. Then Bass could lay to until the sun began to sink. From there he’d follow their trail to the spot where the Arapaho had gathered up that cavvyyard of horses and taken off with them. Having some idea where they were headed, Titus could track them, even as it grew dark … perhaps even after nightfall.

One way or the other, odds were better than even that he could draw up to them by the next day. With both belt pistols, his rifle, and a pair of knives, he gave himself a chance at making a stand against the four warriors come the dark, especially if he could And them separated and making camp, gathering firewood, or just off to take a piss in the brush. No matter that it was four to one by the thinking of others, Bass figured he had to try.

He had been trusted with nearly all that the other three had in the world after all their seasons in the mountains. Wouldn’t they do the same for him? Hadn’t they done damn well the same when they had saved his life?

He had to try.

Whether it was coming through the Falls of the Ohio in that sleeting snowstorm with Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen … or helping to fight off that angry band of Chickasaw along the Mississippi—Bass always chose to try. Sometimes the worth of a man wasn’t so much measured in the successes or the failures he tallied … as it was in the simple fact that he had tried.

And when you stirred up that virtue with that solid notion of having had others put their trust in you—then there really was no decision left him. Really no choice but one. So in the end, if he were to go under before the sun fell any farther in the sky … by damn, he’d make him a good show of it.

Scratch drew himself up and rode on, ready to trail those horsemen and that cavvyyard until he could steal it back from the red niggers that had been dogging his life since that first winter with the Ute.

When Hannah snorted again, it near made him jump in his skin—so surprised was he that she was right behind him, loping up on the tail root of the saddle horse as if she’d gotten her second wind. Her wet nostrils flared as she snorted—rolling her eyes. And when Scratch turned back around in the saddle, there he was.

An Arapaho warrior—as big as life, brassy and bold. Slowly emerging from the timber and brush on the south bank as if he didn’t really expect Bass to bolt on him.

Then Titus realized this wasn’t the solitary warrior who had stayed on his tail after the other three turned back to round up the pack animals Bass had freed. That horseman had been carrying a bow and handful of arrows in his right hand.

But this one held what appeared to be a smoothbore fusil—a big-caliber flintlock trade gun. As much as he picked at it for a moment the way a man might scratch at a scab crusting over an itchy wound, Titus could not recall ever seeing many of the Ute, nor those Shoshone at rendezvous, and certainly not any of the Arapaho, carrying firearms. Only bows, lances, war clubs.

For a heartbeat longer he gazed at the fusil the warrior held in his right hand, the butt resting down on the naked top of his brown thigh, there at the top of his legging where the flesh was exposed. Then as the Arapaho began to O his mouth to holler something, Scratch sawed the reins savagely and almost brought the weary, lathered horse down on a narrow strip of sandy island in the riverbed.

Collapsing to its knees, the horse struggled to get back up as Titus heard the warning cry turn to screeching behind him. The warrior was calling the other three—perhaps more than three.

Just as the saddle mount jolted up and sidestepped on the soft sand, fighting its halter and twisting its head violently, Bass felt as if someone struck him on the back of the right shoulder with a huge stone, maybe a heavy war club—something swung with tremendous weight and velocity. So much force that he felt it picking him out of the saddle, sensed the horse being yanked out from under him as sky and sand blurred together and his dizzy head began to hail with stars.

Just before the black hood of unconsciousness slipped over him, Scratch remembered sensing the brush he tumbled into—knowing somehow that he landed on the riverbank. Then, as he sprawled on the hot, sun-seared sand, his head was no longer dizzy. His shoulder no longer cried out in pain.

Nothing more than cool, blessed black.

He felt it on the sand beneath his cheek more than heard.

The slow, methodical step and scratch of a horse’s hooves on the riverbed pebbles and rocks. Click, click, clack. Click. As much as he tried to open his eyes, everything turned out to be a blur.

The sound was behind him—coming closer, closer. Down in the shallow end of that dark pool where his mind lay, Scratch realized it was the warrior. Closing his eyes into slits to play possum was easy—his mind wasn’t ready to heft or tussle with anything more than lying there, listening….

Then the hoof sounds ceased. Except for the breeze nuzzling the leaves overhead, there was no other sound. No other noise … but for the whisper of soft-soled moccasins moving across the dry streambed. Then the hiss of some sound above his head, something whirling toward his head in the space of that single heartbeat.

Then the lights exploded and even his blurred vision was gone. The cool, blessed blackness cascaded over him again.

How it hurt for him to start that climb out of the thick, oozy black of unconsciousness.

Blinking his eyes once more, he found everything blurred with a paste of sand and sweat plastered against the side of his face. He closed them again, wishing—praying—for the sweet nothingness to envelop him once again. Better, so much better, than this searing pain.

He blinked once more, forcing his one eye open into a slit. Even that made his head throb with pain. Something moved in front of him. He heard it at the same time the wet form in his vision moved in a soggy blur across the harsh light that made him wince.

Some pain in keeping the eye open forced him to close it groggily—but that pain was nothing near the excruciating nausea that threatened to overwhelm him from the back of his mind. No—more so the back of his whole being.

He felt his right arm twisted out from his body at a crude angle, his legs lying akimbo … slowly, inch by agonizing inch, becoming aware of the rest of his body—then suddenly the back of his head again. The pain seeped through his skull at first, then was suddenly all-consuming. The rest of his body forgotten, Bass thought his head felt as if it were one open, raw wound. As if he’d slid down a poplar tree as a boy, scraping off a generous slab of hide in the descent. Tender, pink, beginning to ooze with the first tiny bubblets of blood, a wound that began screeching out in pain louder than he could cry out with his voice … that’s the way the head was.

He dared not open his eyes, for every time he did, it hurt the head worse. Nor could he straighten the arm, numbed, unmoving—completely unresponsive. And his legs felt as if they each weighed more than a thousand pounds, compressed there into the sand and riverbed pebbles.

Maybe they were broke. Maybe everything on him was broke.

Again he heard the pony’s hooves scraping the rocks and wondered if the warrior was leaving again. Leaving him alive. Then the hooves stopped and Bass heard the scritch-scritching. A faint intrusion into the other faint sounds of that afternoon: breeze whisper, leaf rustle, sound of pony hooves and Indian breathing so close, and that scritch-scritching.

With the one eye not plastered shut with sweat and sand, Bass dared it open again. Wanting the warrior to go away, wanting the son of a bitch to take the pain and the bright, excruciating sunlight with him. Just let the shadows and the cool blackness return. Mayhaps, just to sleep. He couldn’t move—so maybe it would be best if he just went back to sleep.

But as he blinked again, the blur in that eye cleared somewhat, and he made out more than the watery movement of swimming colors. Slowly he figured out what he saw were the warrior’s legs … inches away—squatting so close, down on his haunches, for the most part turned away from Bass. Hunched over.

Titus blinked some more, trying desperately to raise his head from the hot sand stuck to the side of his face like burning grit. And in blinking a bit more, he looked across that slow rolling dance of the muscles across the warrior’s bare back, looking farther to make out the movement of the warrior’s bare arms as he crouched over something held in his hands. Working on it. Scraping it with his knife … making that scritch-scritching sound. All that Titus could hear besides the restless hooves of the Arapaho’s pony, and the occasional rustle of breeze.

Scritch …

Then he took himself a look at what held the warrior’s attention there on the sandy bank beside the river. Something dangling from his left hand where he pressed it on top of his right thigh. Dangling like … a scalp.

How he wanted to get a hand up to rub the hot sweat and sand out of his eye, the thick goo he blinked to clear so he could tell-for sure—

Scratch’s breath seized in his chest, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever breathe again. It hit him as squarely and with as much force as had that blow to his back as he’d wheeled away from the warrior in the middle of the river. Like a stone war club, the realization slammed up alongside his head with its sudden, shocking power. Like a bright, meteoric light coming on inside his skull—shooting shards of hot, icy light in a thousand directions at once.

It’s … those long brown curls … damn—the son of a bitch has my hair!

How Titus wanted to cry out, to reach out, to lunge from where he lay. But the very most he could do was to fight off the black cloud a little longer as he grew so very, very weary again. His head grown so damned heavy, he had no hope of holding it up. With a stifled gasp Scratch let it lie on the hot sand—sensing its prickly heat beneath his wet cheek. Gasping for air, so afraid he was about to empty his belly then and there, Bass gulped down the nausea … staring all the time at the warrior crouched over his gory work.

Leastways, not the whole damn thing, he told himself. It looked small—wasn’t the whole thing from brow to nape.

Blinking again as the thick, warm ooze ran into the corner of his eye, Bass fought to stay awake long enough to get himself a good look at the warrior … the one who had done this to him. But the Arapaho was turned just so at his work. That bare brown back, the strong young shoulders. And those leggings, with the wide strip of porcupine quillwork down the outer seam—

That was what he began to study.

Concentrating through the sweat and sand and blood he repeatedly blinked to clear. That particular strip of quillwork running all the way from the top to the bottom of the legging, there at the moccasin.

His eyes locked onto the toe of the moccasin—finding it had the same central design as the legging strip, the same colors.

Maybeso like Bird in Ground’s people—those colors were the bastard’s own power, his private medicine in both form and color.

If he could not move, could not raise a hand … at least he would vow to remember those colors, that pattern, those leggings and moccasins.

As the black seeped down over his consciousness again, Scratch stared, studied, and vowed he would never forget this warrior who had scalped him.

Maybe all that was left was for the son of a bitch to come over and finish him off right where he lay. Bass figured that was next, now that the coup had been counted and the scalp taken—just a quick flash of a sharp blade across the windpipe … or the less-than-pretty river rock bashing the side of his head to jelly.

Just a matter of moments now, he told himself as the black oozed down once more.

Death would be better than this waiting. Death better than not being able to defend himself. Death was better than …

Then black was all there was.

As if it were coming out of a dense winter fog, Scratch heard sound. Sodden and muffled.

It hurt his head to listen. So instead of giving heed to the noises around him, Bass kept his eyes closed and willed himself back into that warm immersion in nothingness. Everything else hurt too damn much.

He was dimly aware that more time slipped past. From the blackness he came to dwell on his heartbeat. How it grew in volume to crowd out the gentle rustle of the leaves suspended just overhead in the brush. Thrum-thrum … thrum-thrum. So loud, it pounded at his ears with a growing ache.

Slowly the awareness of aching grew. He hurt everywhere, so it seemed. There wasn’t a place Bass could not feel pain as the warm bath of that unconscious immersion gradually cooled. Then his left leg and arm began to grow cold. And he sensed the breeze stir across the flesh on the right side of his face—like sunburn.

How long had he been lying there?

For some time he remained content to stay right where he was without pushing the ache: suspended halfway between the oblivion and the total awareness he was certain he would know once he allowed himself to awaken.

Beside him the water continued to whisper. Above him the leaves churkled from time to time as the cool breeze excited them. And from somewhere farther still some birds called. He imagined them sitting on branches somewhere above him, watching him. And with the way some calls moved past him too, Bass imagined them swooping by to look at him sprawled beside the river.

That’s why his leg had grown so cold. He twitched the foot. Feeling. Yes, the bottom of his left leg lay in the river. It and his left hand. Must be the way I come to rest here on the rocks, on the sand, he thought, painstakingly climbing his way out of the safe, dark pool of nonawareness.

First the leg. He struggled to drag it from the water there on the damp, sandy bench beside the river. Now for the arm. At first he flicked his fingers in the cool water—fully aware now that he had been right about the river, although his head was turned away from the water—but he had yet to attempt opening his eyes again.

Behind his lids he saw again a portrait of what he had seen the last time he’d opened them. As if it were being played out slowly—then stopped … slowly again—then stopped. The excruciating remembrance of that warrior scraping at … at his own scalp there beside Titus as he lay wounded on the bank. The Arapaho rose to his feet, stuffing the long brown-haired trophy beneath the narrow leather belt from which hung his breechclout, leggings, and the sheath for that knife as he bent over and swished the weapon in the river before plunging it home in the rawhide sheath.

That pattern of color on the leggings, across the toe of the moccasins as the warrior turned toward him, took a step his way, then lunged up the bank. And away.

Lying here now at this moment, Bass squeezed his closed eyes tightly, as if he wanted to dispel the terrible vision that remembrance brought him. Then he decided to draw both eyes into thin slits and allowed that crack of light to penetrate his thick blanket of nonawareness.

Realizing the shadows had lengthened. Branches and leaves and the trunks of the cottonwood around him—all of it had the colors of late afternoon now. Not the bright, severe colors of midday. Not that last light he remembered seeing on the warrior’s moccasin.

And now his left eye pained him. Blinking to clear it, he found he could not. So matted with sand and grit, dried sweat, and the solid crust of old coagulate.

Trying his left arm, Bass found that with some struggle he could drag it out of the water, sweep it around in a wide arc, and then fold the elbow so the damp fingertips reached the eye where that side of his face lay on the sand. There was far too much there to wash off with what little dampness he had brought from the river—but it was enough that he could rub, then rub some more until the eye gradually opened without the pain of grit, opened with a blurry dance, with liquid motion.

It was late in the day.

Behind him, where he felt the sun on his back, on the bare flesh of his right cheek, and there on the back of his head—Bass knew the sun was still in the sky, but sinking low. By the length of the shadows, by the colors of the leaves and the tree bark, the texture of the sand near his face and the touch of the breeze against his sunburned flesh—he knew the sun would soon drop behind the tall cottonwoods. Very, very soon.

And then it would become dark—and he would need a fire.

His belly rumbled hungrily.

Then he moved his right leg willfully. Both of them cooperated as he tested his hips by rolling a little this way, a little that.

All that was left was to move that right arm.

God—damn! did that hurt.

Clamping down his teeth, he forced himself to move the arm a little more—causing his empty, rumbling stomach to lurch with the pain. He recognized it as that peculiar nausea the body produced when confronted with unbearable torture. It, too, was something he would push himself through. Like stepping through a door—that’s all he had to do. Take a step: move the arm a little more.

It was so sore through the whole shoulder, the upper arm, down into the upper part of his chest … maybe just because he had been lying there all this time without moving it, he told himself. Convincing himself that to move it a little more, then a little more after that, all that he did would help. Every inch he managed to drag it up and toward him, every twitch of movement to dispel the numbness would eventually make this exquisite, rising pain a bit more bearable.

Then, before he realized it, Scratch had both arms beneath him, propped, pushing up, heaving against the weight of his upper body. The right arm shuddered and trembled as it drew his chest up.

Blinking quickly in the shifting of the sun’s light as he came off the sand, Titus looked down, his head so damned heavy … looked down and saw the dark smudge blotting the sand. Then slowly turned his chin, focused his eyes on his right shoulder there near the arm. That right arm was trembling as it propped him halfway up, Bass realized.

A puddle of dried blood below him. Sand caked on the right side of his chest where more blood had soaked through the leather of his shirt.

By then the pain in the shoulder and arm was more than he could bear any longer. As his stomach lurched and he gagged with that first heave, Titus willed his legs beneath him so that he could sit up, hunch forward, and puke out what little his stomach still had in it from a predawn breakfast so, so long ago. The bile coated and burned his tongue. But he got through it.

Realizing he needed water as he spit the last of the yellow phlegm from his sand-crusted lips, Scratch slowly volved around on his left hip. Pulling himself around with his left arm—remembering that it had been in the water.

There it was. He dipped that hand back into the cool river. Soaked to the elbow he was already, seeing the dark leather as he brought the first cupped hand to his lips. Savoring the precious drops that didn’t spill as he trembled. Then some more. And more after that—licking his hand each time, sucking on each finger. Every drop like the most delicious taste he had ever experienced upon his tongue—

A bird flew inches overhead, crying out. Snowflash of tail feathers. Magpie. Come to pick at me, he thought. See if there was anything rotting yet.

It made the tears come to his eyes as he ruminated on that and sucked the drops off his fingers. How the carrion birds would have picked at his eyeballs, dug away at the bloody rings of crimson blossoming out from the bullet holes, both back and front.

Looking down at the right side of his shoulder again, the tears flowed easily. Damn good thing the bullet went right on through. Some things just naturally stood out as being lucky, he figured. Other things a man had to work at to find lucky. But with this there was no question. He had stopped bleeding. The holes were too high—the Indian’s round ball hadn’t crashed through his lights. No lung was punctured. And as much as his shoulder hurt, he could move the arm a little.

Besides, he reminded himself, the shoulder didn’t hurt near as much as his head—

It was that sudden flare of realization that rocked him to his core.

That piece of his flesh, that hunk of his long brown hair laying over the warrior’s thigh, being scraped free of blood and gore before it was stuffed beneath the bastard’s belt.

He took it with him and left me here—figuring me for dead.

At the same time that Bass’s heart leaped with celebration that the Arapaho hadn’t finished him off with a war club … he grew angry at the warrior, for there was no greater insult, nowhere near the coup, than to take his enemy’s hair. And then Bass became angry at himself for hurting so bad. Not just the back of his skull, but his heart with the shame of it.

From somewhere in the tender, raw, agonized tendrils of his mind, he knew he had to do something about covering that head of his. Slowly, gradually, Bass brought his dampened left hand to the back of his head. Gingerly he brushed wet, cool fingertips across the sun-fevered skull at first. Strange to find it so hard, so dry. And that, his numbed mind told him, was just the danger.

Got to cover it.

Dipping his left hand in the water again, Bass brought the wet fingers to the back of his skull, again and again he tapped them gently on that bare patch of bone where his topknot had once rested. Sensing as he did so that the edges of the wound, his very flesh where the hair was matted with blood, the crust of coagulate and flesh had already dried in a hard, ragged circle.

Tears came again as he realized he had survived. And told himself he would survive.

With the left hand he dug into the sand and pushed with both legs to shove himself toward the overhang of some willow where he spotted the rocks. There, back in the cool shadows, atop some of the smooth, round-topped rocks, lay the green topknots on each one.

With his quaking fingers, he scraped off the first of the cool, damp moss—then brought it to his dry, tortured skullcap. At first the soppy material made him shiver, it was so cold on the open wound. But as he applied a second scraping of moss, then more, the pain gradually subsided. And the ragged wound was soothed.

The animal snorted—quiet hooves on the rocky bank.

The bastard had come back!

Wheeling on his hip, Bass’s head swam, dizzy from such swift motion—fighting to clear his mind. Afraid. Dragging his left hand across the back of his belt, he found his scabbards empty. So fearful was he that Scratch brought both empty hands up into claws. Despite the pain it caused him in that shoulder. Those claws were all he had.

The animal snorted, and its unshod hooves clicked upon the rocks as it emerged from the brush.

He held his breath, heart thumping, ready to fight for his life now that it had been spared the first time….

“H-hannah,” he croaked in a hoarse whisper, the first sound his throat had made all day.

She stopped, her nostrils flaring a moment, sniffing the air and looking him over as if to be sure it was really him.

“Come … c’mere,” he said, his voice cracking. “C’mere, girl.” Bass tried to whistle, but barely got out a squeak.

Her head bobbed once, and she clattered forward on the rocks to stand over him, between her master and the sun. Shading him.

Bass was no longer alone.